"The biggest bunch--judgin by the dust, kennit--headed into town and went for Took's, which made sense because there were some'd thought to hide their babbies in the storage bin out behind. Tooky had a secret room way at the back where he kep' cash and gems and a few old guns and other outright tradeables he'd taken in; they don't call em Tooks for nothin, ye know!" Again the rusty, cackling chuckle. "It were a good cosy, not even the folk who worked fer the old buzzard knew it were there, yet when the time come the Wolves went right to it and took the babbies and kilt anyone tried to stand in their way or even speak a word o' beggary to em. And then they whopped at the store with their light-sticks when they rode out and set it to burn. Burnt flat, it did, and they was lucky not to've lost the whole town, young sai, for the flames started out of them sticks the Wolves carry ain't like other fire, that can be put out with enough water. T'row water on these 'uns, they feed on it! Grow higher! Higher and hotter! Yer-bugger!"
He spat over the rail for emphasis, then looked at Eddie shrewdly.
"All of which Ah'm sayin is this: no matter how many in these parts my grandson conwinces to stand up and fight, or you and yer brownie, Eben Took won't never be among em. Tooks has kep' that store since time was toothless, and they don't ever mean to see it burned flat again. Once 'us enough for them cowardy custards, do'ee foller?"
"Yes."
"The other two dust-clouds, the biggest of em hied sout' for the ranches. The littlest come down East Rud toward the smallholds, which was where we were, and where we made our stand."
The old man's face gleamed, memory-bound. Eddie did not glimpse the young man who had been (Granpere was too old for that), but in his rheumy eyes he saw the mixture of excitement and determination and sick fear which must have filled him that day. Must have filled them all. Eddie felt himself reaching out for it the way a hungry man will reach for food, and the old man must have seen some of this on his face, for he seemed to swell and gain vigor. Certainly this wasn't a reaction the old man had ever gotten from his grandson; Tian did not lack for bravery, say thankya, but he was a sodbuster for all that. This man, however, this Eddie of New York . . . he might live a short life and die with his face in the dirt, but he was no sodbuster, by 'Riza.
"Go on," Eddie said.
"Aye. So Ah will. Some of those comin toward us split off on River Rud, toward the little rice-manors that're there--you c'd see the dust--and a few more split off on Peaberry Road. Ah 'member Pokey Slidell turned to me, had this kind of sick smile on his face, and he stuck out his hand (the one didn't have his bah in it), and he said . . . "
SEVEN
What Pokey Slidell says under a burning autumn sky with the sound of the season's last crickets rising from the high white grass on either side of them is "It's been good to know ya, Jamie Jaffords, say true." He's got a smile on his face like none Jamie has ever seen before, but being only nineteen and living way out here on what some call the Rim and others call the Crescent, there's plenty he's never seen before. Or will ever see, way it looks now. It's a sick smile, but there's no cowardice in it. Jamie guesses he's wearing one just like it. Here they are under the sun of their fathers, and the darkness will soon have them. They've come to their dying hour.
Nonetheless, his grip is strong when he seizes Pokey's hand. "You ain't done knowin me yet, Pokey," he says.
"Hope you're right."
The dust-cloud moils toward them. In a minute, maybe less, they will be able to see the riders throwing it. And, more important, the riders throwing it will be able to see them.
Eamon Doolin says, "You know, I believe we ort to get in that ditch"--he points to the right side of the road--"an' snay down small-small. Then, soon's they go by, we can jump out and have at em."
Molly Doolin is wearing tight black silk pants and a white silk blouse open at the throat to show a tiny silver reap charm: Oriza with her fist raised. In her own right hand, Molly holds a sharpened dish, cool blue titanium steel painted over with a delicate lacework of green spring rice. Slung over her shoulder is a reed pouch lined with silk. In it are five more plates, two of her own and three of her mother's. Her hair is so bright in the bright light that it looks as if her head is on fire. Soon enough it will be burning, say true.
"You can do what you like, Eamon Doolin," she tells him. "As for me, I'm going to stand right here where they can see me and shout my twin sister's name so they'll hear it plain. They may ride me down but I'll kill one of 'un or cut the legs out from under one of their damn horses before they do, of that much I'll be bound."
There's no time for more. The Wolves come out of the dip that marks the entrance to Arra's little smallhold patch, and the four Calla-folken can see them at last and there is no more talk of hiding. Jamie almost expected Eamon Doolin, who is mild-mannered and already losing his hair at twenty-three, to drop his bah and go pelting into the high grass with his hands raised to show his surrender. Instead, he moves into place next to his wife and nocks a bolt. There is a low whirring sound as he winds the cord tight-tight.
They stand across the road with their boots in the floury dust. They stand blocking the road. And what fills Jamie like a blessing is a sense of grace. This is the right thing to do. They're going to die here, but that's all right. Better to die than stand by while they take more children. Each one of them has lost a twin, and Pokey--who is by far the oldest of them--has lost both a brother and a young son to the Wolves. This is right. They understand that the Wolves may exact a toll of vengeance on the rest for this stand they're making, but it doesn't matter. This is right.
"Come on!" Jamie shouts, and winds his own bah--once and twice, then click. "Come on, 'ee buzzards! 'Ee cowardy custards, come on and have some! Say Calla! Say Calla Bryn Sturgis!"
There is a moment in the heat of the day when the Wolves seem to draw no closer but only to shimmer in place. Then the sound of their horses' hooves, previously dull and muffled, grows sharp. And the Wolves seem to leap forward through the swarming air. Their pants are as gray as the hides of their horses. Dark-green cloaks flow out behind them. Green hoods surround masks (they must be masks) that turn the heads of the four remaining riders into the heads of snarling, hungry wolves.
"Four agin' four!" Jamie screams. "Four agin' four, even up, stand yer ground, cullies! Never run a step!"
The four Wolves sweep toward them on their gray horses. The men raise their bahs. Molly--sometimes called Red Molly, for her famous temper even more than her hair--raises her dish over her left shoulder. She looks not angry now but cool and calm.
The two Wolves on the end have light-sticks. They raise them. The two in the middle draw back their fists, which are clad in green gloves, to throw something. Sneetches, Jamie thinks coldly. That's what them are.
"Hold, boys . . . " Pokey says. "Hold . . . hold . . . now!"
He lets fly with a twang, and Jamie sees Pokey's bah-bolt pass just over the head of the Wolf second to the right. Eamon's strikes the neck of the horse on the far left. The beast gives a crazy whinnying cry and staggers just as the Wolves begin to close the final forty yards of distance. It crashes into its neighbor horse just as that second horse's rider throws the thing in his hand. It is indeed one of the sneetches, but it sails far off course and none of its guidance systems can lock onto anything.
Jamie's bolt strikes the chest of the third rider. Jamie begins a scream of triumph that dies in dismay before it ever gets out of his throat. The bolt bounces off the thing's chest just as it would have bounced off Andy's, or a stone in the Son of a Bitch field.
Wearing armor, oh you buggardly thing, you're wearing armor under that twice-damned--
The other sneetch flies true, striking Eamon Doolin square in the face. His head explodes in a spray of blood and bone and mealy gray stuff. The sneetch flies on maybe thirty grop, then whirls and comes back. Jamie ducks and hears it flash over his head, giving off a low, hard hum as it flies.
Molly has never moved, not even when she is showered with her husband's blood and
brains. Now she screams, "THIS IS FOR MINNIE, YOU SONS OF WHORES!" and throws her plate. The distance is very short by now--hardly any distance at all--but she throws it hard and the plate rises as soon as it leaves her hand.
Too hard, dear, Jamie thinks as he ducks the swipe of a light-stick (the light-stick is also giving off that hard, savage buzz). Too hard, yer-bugger.
But the Wolf at which Molly has aimed actually rides into the rising dish. It strikes at just the point where the thing's green hood crosses the wolf-mask it wears. There is an odd, muffled sound--chump!--and the thing falls backward off its horse with its green-gauntleted hands flying up.
Pokey and Jamie raise a wild cheer, but Molly just reaches coolly into her pouch for another dish, all of them nestled neatly in there with the blunt gripping arcs pointed up. She is pulling it out when one of the light-sticks cuts the arm off her body. She staggers, teeth peeling back from her lips in a snarl, and goes to one knee as her blouse bursts into flame. Jamie is amazed to see that she is reaching for the plate in her severed hand as it lies in the dust of the road.
The three remaining Wolves are past them. The one Molly caught with her dish lies in the dust, jerking crazily, those gauntleted hands flying up and down into the sky as if it's trying to say, "What can you do? What can you do with these damned sodbusters?"
The other three wheel their mounts as neatly as a drill-team of cavalry soldiers and race back toward them. Molly pries the dish from her own dead fingers, then falls backward, engulfed in fire.
"Stand, Pokey!" Jamie cries hysterically as their death rushes toward them under the burning steel sky, "Stand, gods damn you!" And still that feeling of grace as he smells the charring flesh of the Doolins. This is what they should have done all along, aye, all of them, for the Wolves can be brought down, although they'll probably not live to tell and these will take their dead compadre with them so none will know.
There's a twang as Pokey fires another bolt and then a sneetch strikes him dead center and he explodes inside his clothes, belching blood and torn flesh from his sleeves, his cuffs, from the busted buttons of his fly. Again Jamie is drenched, this time by the hot stew that was his friend. He fires his own bah, and sees it groove the side of a gray horse. He knows it's useless to duck but he ducks anyway and something whirs over his head. One of the horses strikes him hard as it passes, knocking him into the ditch where Eamon proposed they hide. His bah flies from his hand. He lies there, open-eyed, not moving, knowing as they wheel their horses around again that there is nothing for it now but to play dead and hope they pass him by. They won't, of course they won't, but it's the only thing to do and so he does it, trying to give his eyes the glaze of death. In another few seconds, he knows, he won't have to pretend. He smells dust, he hears the crickets in the grass, and he holds onto these things, knowing they are the last things he will ever smell and hear, that the last thing he sees will be the Wolves, bearing down on him with their frozen snarls.
They come pounding back.
One of them turns in its saddle and throws a sneetch from its gloved hand as it passes. But as it throws, the rider's horse leaps the body of the downed Wolf, which still lies twitching in the road, although now its hands barely rise. The sneetch flies above Jamie, just a little too high. He can almost feel it hesitate, searching for prey. Then it soars on, out over the field.
The Wolves ride east, pulling dust behind them. The sneetch doubles back and flies over Jamie again, this time higher and slower. The gray horses sweep around a curve in the road fifty yards east and are lost to view. The last he sees of them are three green cloaks, pulled out almost straight and fluttering.
Jamie stands up in the ditch on legs that threaten to buckle beneath him. The sneetch makes another loop and comes back, this time directly toward him, but now it is moving slowly, as if whatever powers it is almost exhausted. Jamie scrambles back into the road, falls to his knees next to the burning remains of Pokey's body, and seizes his bah. This time he holds it by the end, as one might hold a Points mallet. The sneetch cruises toward him. Jamie draws the bah to his shoulder, and when the thing comes at him, he bats it out of the air as if it were a giant bug. It falls into the dust beside one of Pokey's torn-off shor'boots and lies there buzzing malevolently, trying to rise.
"There, you bastard!" Jamie screams, and begins to scoop dust over the thing. He is weeping. "There, you bastard! There! There!" At last it's gone, buried under a heap of white dust that buzzes and shakes and at last becomes still.
Without rising--he doesn't have the strength to find his feet again, not yet, can still hardly believe he is alive--Jamie Jaffords knee-walks toward the monster Molly has killed . . . and it is dead now, or at least lying still. He wants to pull off its mask, see it plain. First he kicks at it with both feet, like a child doing a tantrum. The Wolf's body rocks from side to side, then lies still again. A pungent, reeky smell is coming from it. A rotten-smelling smoke is rising from the mask, which appears to be melting.
Dead, thinks the boy who will eventually become Granpere, the oldest living human in the Calla. Dead, aye, never doubt it. So garn, ye gutless! Garn and unmask it!
He does. Under the burning autumn sun he takes hold of the rotting mask, which feels like some sort of metal mesh, and he pulls it off, and he sees . . .
EIGHT
For a moment Eddie wasn't even aware that the old guy had stopped talking. He was still lost in the story, mesmerized. He saw everything so clearly it could have been him out there on the East Road, kneeling in the dust with the bah cocked to his shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to knock the oncoming sneetch out of the air.
Then Susannah rolled past the porch toward the barn with a bowl of chickenfeed in her lap. She gave them a curious look on her way by. Eddie woke up. He hadn't come here to be entertained. He supposed the fact that he could be entertained by such a story said something about him.
"And?" Eddie asked the old man when Susannah had gone into the barn. "What did you see?"
"Eh?" Granpere gave him a look of such perfect vacuity that Eddie despaired.
"What did you see? When you took off the mask?"
For a moment that look of emptiness--the lights are on but no one's home--held. And then (by pure force of will, it seemed to Eddie) the old man came back. He looked behind him, at the house. He looked toward the black maw of the barn, and the lick of phosphor-light deep inside. He looked around the yard itself.
Frightened, Eddie thought. Scared to death.
Eddie tried to tell himself this was only an old man's paranoia, but he felt a chill, all the same.
"Lean close," Granpere muttered, and when Eddie did: "The only one Ah ever told was my boy Luke . . . Tian's Da', do'ee ken. Years and years later, this was. He told me never to speak of it to anyone else. Ah said, 'But Lukey, what if it could help? What if it could help t'next time they come?' "
Granpere's lips barely moved, but his thick accent had almost entirely departed, and Eddie could understand him perfectly.
"And he said to me, 'Da', if'ee really b'lieved knowin c'd help, why have'ee not told afore now?' And Ah couldn't answer him, young fella, cos 'twas nothing but intuition kep' my gob shut. Besides, what good could it do? What do it change?"
"I don't know," Eddie said. Their faces were close. Eddie could smell beef and gravy on old Jamie's breath. "How can I, when you haven't told me what you saw?"
" 'The Red King always finds 'is henchmen,' my boy said. 'It'd be good if no one ever knew ye were out there, better still if no one ever heard what ye saw out there, lest it get back to em, aye, even in Thunderclap.' And Ah seen a sad thing, young fella."
Although he was almost wild with impatience, Eddie thought it best to let the old guy unwind it in his own way. "What was that, Granpere?"
"Ah seen Luke didn't entirely believe me. Thought his own Da' might just be a-storyin, tellin a wild tale about bein a Wolf-killer t'look tall. Although ye'd think even a halfwit would see that if Ah was goingter make a tale, Ah'd ma
ke it me that killed the Wolf, and not Eamon Doolin's wife."
That made sense, Eddie thought, and then remembered Granpere at least hinting that he had taken credit more than once-upon-a, as Roland sometimes said. He smiled in spite of himself.
"Lukey were afraid someone else might hear my story and believe it. That it'd get on to the Wolves and Ah might end up dead fer no more than tellin a make-believe story. Not that it were." His rheumy old eyes begged at Eddie's face in the growing dark. "You believe me, don't ya?"
Eddie nodded. "I know you say true, Granpere. But who . . . " Eddie paused. Who would rat you out? was how the question came to mind, but Granpere might not understand. "But who would tell? Who did you suspect?"
Granpere looked around the darkening yard, seemed about to speak, then said nothing.
"Tell me," Eddie said. "Tell me what you--"
A large dry hand, a-tremor with age but still amazingly strong, gripped his neck and pulled him close. Bristly whiskers rasped against the shell of Eddie's ear, making him shudder all over and break out in gooseflesh.
Granpere whispered nineteen words as the last light died out of the day and night came to the Calla.
Eddie Dean's eyes widened. His first thought was that he now understood about the horses--all the gray horses. His second was Of course. It makes perfect sense. We should have known.
The nineteenth word was spoken and Granpere's whisper ceased. The hand gripping Eddie's neck dropped back into Granpere's lap. Eddie turned to face him. "Say true?"
"Aye, gunslinger," said the old man. "True as ever was. Ah canna' say for all of em, for many sim'lar masks may cover many dif'runt faces, but--"
"No," Eddie said, thinking of gray horses. Not to mention all those sets of gray pants. All those green cloaks. It made perfect sense. What was that old song his mother used to sing? You're in the army now, you're not behind the plow. You'll never get rich, you son of a bitch, you're in the army now.
"I'll have to tell this story to my dinh," Eddie said.
Granpere nodded slowly. "Aye," he said, "as ye will. Ah dun't git along well witta boy, ye kennit. Lukey tried to put t'well where Tian pointed wit' t' drotta stick, y'ken."